Miami, FL – Cryptocurrencies need no regulation, something the bitcoin price chart under successive US administrations clearly shows, according to provocative BitMEX co-founder and Maelstrom CIO Arthur Hayes.
Hayes’ thesis is simple: fiat liquidity – precisely, the printing of more units of fiat money – is the only thing that affects bitcoin’s value proposition.
“If you want to talk about the price of Bitcoin and what the fair value is, or what the future price is, the only thing that matters is how many fiat units there are today,” Hayes told the audience at Consensus Miami 2026. “How many fiat units will there be in the future and what is the pace of this fiat creation?”
While there’s a lot of talk about tradfi, regulators and cryptocurrencies getting together and having this “bastard child,” most people who attend conferences like Consensus just want to see the number go up, Hayes said. But they forget what has made the price of Bitcoin go from zero to the trillions of dollars it is worth today, he added, emphasizing his thesis:
“The more money that is printed in the United States and around the world, the more value bitcoin will have in fiat currencies,” Hayes said. “And it’s this part of the liquidity equation that really drives the price of bitcoin, and it has nothing to do with politics.”
Few crypto executives maintain a social presence as lively, chaotic, and strangely insightful as Hayes. Behind the lapel-grabbing theatrics lies a track record that operators pay attention to. For example, Hayes was among the first in the rise of several AI-adjacent tokens, a sector that dominated speculative flows throughout 2024 and 2025. He also championed Zcash (ZEC), which rallied more than 450% over the past year.
If we look at the last US administrations, we can identify key factors that greatly drove the value of bitcoin, Hayes said. This started with bailing out the banks during the banking crisis and printing a lot more money, which sent bitcoin “off to the races.”
More recently, events such as COVID, stimulus checks, Biden’s Green New Deal, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have increased the value of bearer assets such as bitcoin and gold.
“This is the value that bitcoin provides outside of the regulatory apparatus,” Hayes said. “It’s precisely why it doesn’t adhere to the regulatory regime that some of you want to subject it to with bills like the Clarity Act and other things.”
